Friday, February 6, 2009

The End of the Internet

If you have ever wondered where the end of the internet is ... apparently it is our house. A couple of months ago I started getting postcard ads in the mail that CenturyTel had DSL available in our neighborhood. Having been a slave to Hughesnet and $89.99 a month satellite internet service for the past five years, I was excited but skeptical.

I called to check it all out and they assured me that yes it was indeed true. Woohoo! Of course the fastest speed they could promise for anytime in the foreseeable future was 512k. Hughesnet promised much faster but has never delivered *(until 3 days last week when it tested at 1.5 mbps) and is incredibly frustrating and unreliable but the only game in town unless we wanted dialup. We didn't.

So today I took a half day off and waited patiently for the CenturyTel guy. He worked and tweaked and disconnected and reconnected and walked from the cabin to the barn to the house about six times until FINALLY he had the blazing speed of 512k coursing through our lines. I decided I'd give it a month to decide if I could give Hughesnet the boot but so far I'm pleased. We'll likely never get the blazing 3 mbps speeds of our town friends unless the lay all new lines but I guess this is the price we have to pay for living in the boonies.

The CenturyTel guy said we were the end of the line. The end of the internet.

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